Taxpayers might again ask why the Federal Reserve was so eager to bail out all of AIG's deals (credit default swaps) linked to problematic CDOs at 100 cents on the dollar. The largest beneficiary of that largesse was Goldman Sachs, whose former officers rose to influential positions in the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank and were at Goldman's helm when these deals were created.

Tim Geithner lies to Ali Velshi and the nation about his knowledge of the AIG bonus payments on CNN yesterday.

To the cynics who clamor that journalists are missing the bigger picture regarding AIG, I respond that it is they who have been blinded. The rub is no longer the $165 million in bonuses or even the $173 billion in taxpayer largesse. At issue are the potentially criminal lies being told by Tim Geithner as part of a shameless White House attempt at hiding its role in approving and even lobbying for over $1 billion in AIG bonuses to be paid this year.

A $5 million Connecticut mansion. A $4 million London townhouse. A $7 million English estate. The houses are owned by three men CBS News has learned are now the subjects of a Justice Department criminal investigation into how AIG crumbled.

Sources say investigators are digging into whether Joseph Cassano, the former head of London-based AIG Financial Products, and two of his top deputies - Andrew Forster, an executive vice president, and Thomas Athan, a managing director - committed securities fraud and other federal crimes, reports CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian.

At issue: whether they intentionally provided false information about the size of AIG's loses in the mortgage-backed securities market to the public and auditors.

"They would look at the email traffic to try and see who was saying what to whom," said John Laperla, a former fraud investigator for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.